Aftermath News

Associated Press | May 11, 2008

By KEVIN FREKING

WASHINGTON - Families claiming that a mercury-based preservative in vaccines triggers autism will challenge mainstream medicine Monday as they take their case to a federal court.

They seek vindication and financial redress from a government fund that helps people injured by shots.

Two 10-year-old boys from Portland, Ore., will serve as the test cases that determine whether the children and their families should be compensated. Attorneys for the boys will attempt to show the boys were happy, healthy and developing normally. But, after being exposed to vaccines with thimerosal, they began to regress and show symptoms of autism.

Thimerosal has been removed in recent years from standard childhood vaccines, except the flu shot. In 2004, a committee with the Institute of Medicine concluded there was no credible evidence that vaccines containing thimerosal caused autism.

Overall, nearly 4,900 families have filed claims with the U.S. Court of Claims alleging that vaccines caused autism and other neurological problems in their children. Lawyers for the families will present three different theories of how vaccines caused autism.

The case beginning Monday focuses on the second of those theories: that thimerosal-containing vaccines alone cause autism. Lawyers for the petitioning families said they will present evidence that injections with thimerosal deposit a form of mercury in the brain. That mercury excites certain brain cells that stay chronically activated trying to get rid of the intrusion.

“In some kids, there’s enough of it that it sets off this chronic neuroinflammatory pattern that can lead to regressive autism,” said attorney Mike Williams.

In the end, the families’ attorneys hope to convince a special master of the U.S. Court of Claims that thimerosal belongs on the list of causes for the inflammation that leads to regressive autism.

To win, the attorneys for the two boys, William Mead and Jordan King, will have to show that it”s more likely than not that the vaccine actually caused the injury.

Many members of the medical community are skeptical of the families’ claims. They worry that the claims about the dangers of vaccines could cause some people to forgo vaccines that prevent illness.

“I think that what’s so endearing to me about the anti-vaccine people is they’re perfectly willing to go from one hypothesis to the next without a backward glance,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and affects a person’s ability to communicate and interact with others. Dr. Andrew Gerber, a psychiatrists, said that medical experts don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what causes autism, but they do know there is a strong hereditary component.

Toxins from the environment could play a role, but currently, data does not support that they do, Gerber said.

Arguments are scheduled to go on throughout the month. A final decision could take several more months to occur. Claims that are successful would result in compensation taking into account lost earnings after age 18 and up to $250,000 for pain and suffering.

The families or the federal government can also appeal the decision of the special master to the Court of Federal Claims or to a federal appeals court.

While there have been about 5,000 claims relating to autism, there have been fewer than 3,000 claims for all other vaccines.

Doctors to decide who lives and who dies in coming pandemic

Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers

AP | May 5, 2008

By LINDSEY TANNER

CHICAGO (AP) — Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.

The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.

To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:

_People older than 85.

_Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.

_Severely burned patients older than 60.

_Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.

_Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.

Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.

Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also “a political minefield and a legal minefield.”

The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.

If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, “there are some real ethical concerns here.”

James Bentley, a senior vice president at American Hospital Association, said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own preparedness plans even if they don’t follow all the suggestions.

He said the proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.
Bentley said it’s not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that “this is the most detailed one I have seen from a professional group.”

While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux said compiling the list “was emotionally difficult for everyone.”
That’s partly because members believe it’s just a matter of time before such a health care disaster hits, she said.

“You never know,” Devereaux said. “SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn’t even know it existed.”

Old-Thinker News | May 4, 2008

By Daniel Taylor

In July of 1994 the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) produced the paper titled Revolution In Military Affairs And Conflict Short Of War that uncannily forecasted the future in a “hypothetical future history” written in the year 2010.

Computer generated insurgents claim responsibility for attacks that U.S. forces carry out, pharmaceutical drugs are used as a part of national security strategy, “attitude shaping campaigns” are directed against the American people, traditional boundaries between military and law enforcement are abolished, subliminal conditioning is used in combination with propaganda, and bioelectric tags are implanted in citizens. By 2010 the revolutionaries’ goals were met.

All of this will likely sound eerily familiar to followers of current events, or for that matter anyone who lived to see the events of September 11th 2001, its resulting wars, and its truly “revolutionary” effects in the reorganization of government and law. The Bush administration’s signature legislation, the Patriot Act, has infringed on multiple sections of the Bill of Rights and Constitution. Posse Comitatus, which has protected Americans from the military engaging in domestic law enforcement since 1807 was reversed when the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 was passed last year.

The Neoconservatives reign in the United States holds striking similarities to the scenario outlined in the 1994 SSI report. Interestingly, the document clearly stated that, “Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the other Third World caricatures of the Soviet Union are perfect opponents for a RMA-type [Revolution in Military Affairs] military.”

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Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Independent | Apr 15, 2008

From the old railway station, now a hollow shell covered in weeds, a long concrete stairway, sheltered by sub-tropical foliage, winds from the centre of Sukhumi up to a collection of buildings, many pocked with bullet holes or crushed by bombs.

The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.

This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.

But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute’s former glory.

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.

“Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi,” says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. “He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it.” Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.

In time, the institute evolved from science fiction to evidence-based practice. Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century.

One man’s name is synonymous with the centre. Boris Lapin was born in 1921 and after a heroic turn in the Second World War, started work at the Sukhumi monkey colony in 1949. In 1959 he was appointed director of the institute, and ran it up until 1992, when during the Abkhaz-Georgian war he fled along with the majority of employees and monkeys across the border to Russia. Despite being in his late eighties, he still runs the institute set up at Adler in Russia.

“My biggest achievement over all this time is that we were able to build the institute up from scratch again,” he says, from his Adler office, plastered with photographs of famous visitors to the Sukhumi institute over the years, from Nikita Khrushchev to Ho Chi Minh.

In the 1950s, as Professor Lapin was taking over, word got out to the rest of the world about the uses to which monkeys were being put at Sukhumi. “At the time of Sputnik, there was a huge amount of curiosity in the West about what else the Soviets might have up their sleeves in the fields of science and technology,” says Douglas Bowden, an American primatologist who has co-operated with the Sukhumi, then Adler centres since 1962. An expert commission headed by President Dwight Eisenhower’s personal doctor went to the Soviet Union in 1957 and visited Sukhumi. “They were so impressed with what they found there that when they came back to the US they recommended to Eisenhower that a similar institute should be set up in the US.” In the end, seven centres were set up in the US.

As time went on, the centre also became closely involved with the Soviet space programme, training six monkeys to send into space. “We had to make sure they were intelligent monkeys to perform all their duties in space,” Professor Lapin says. “Not every monkey was capable of that sort of thing.” After the monkeys blasted off, the centre’s employees would watch them on television at Sukhumi.

Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was a disaster for scientists across the vast empire. They went from the pride of the country to being neglected and unfunded. “They were terrible times,” says Professor Barkaya. “Many monkeys died, and many people too. We had nothing to feed the monkeys with, and there was no electricity or heating. Many of them simply froze to death.”

Violeta Agrba, who was the acting director of the institute during the war, while Professor Lapin was arranging the transfer to Adler, says: “I remember walking around the cages in the winter of 1992, during the war, and seeing a baboon shivering in his cage. It was so sad. But even though we couldn’t do any medical work, and there was a war on, we all came to work every day.” Professor Agrba once found an unexploded shell on the conference table in her office. There was a huge hole in the ceiling.

The centre also had 1,000 monkeys that lived freely in a special zone in the mountains in the south of Abkhazia, where they were monitored and their behaviour studied. When the war started, many died in the crossfire; some were stolen by troops and used as mascots. “Some are still alive,” Professor Agrba says. “But after everything that happened in the war, they are so scared of people they don’t approach anyone. We need to do a helicopter survey and find the remaining ones, but there’s no money for that.”

Today, the centre at Sukhumi, where a few staff who refused to leave during the war have bravely remained and tried to resurrect their scientific work, is struggling to get back on its feet. A German scientist who worked with the institute before the war and took pity on their situation ships them medicines and equipment each year. But most of the best employees went to Alder, and the monkeys seem to have nothing to eat except mandarins.

“The level we had before is very difficult to attain now,” Professor Barkaya says. “But while we used to write to people asking to co-operate with them, now they’re again coming to us. We had an interesting proposition from St Petersburg, from a company that has produced medicine to reduce blindness in old people. They’ve tested it on dogs and horses and now they want to test it on monkeys.”

The Adler centre in much better shape, with all the most modern equipment and is still at the forefront of medicine, working on stem-cell research and birdflu vaccines, and testing the effects of radiation on monkeys in preparation for a manned flight to Mars. “We’ve discovered that their immune systems are severely weakened by the radiation given off by solar flares,” says Professor Agrba. “Now we need to see how serious this is and how long it lasts.”

But even at Adler, the financial situation isn’t easy. “One girl used to work here as a lab assistant and got paid 3,000 roubles (£65) a month,” Professor Agrba says. “She left to work selling blankets in the market and now she makes 15,000 roubles (£325).”

Obtaining new monkeys is almost impossible now, with most countries banning their export. The days when Professor Lapin and colleagues would simply fly to Nigeria and spend weeks negotiating with tribes for the purchase of monkeys, as happened in the 1960s, are long gone. The Adler institute has a breeding programme, which ensures that its population of 3,700 monkeys is refreshed each year. But for Sukhumi, with just 286 monkeys, inbreeding is a serious problem.

The staff at both centres is split between dignified octogenarians with decades of scientific experience, and budding young scientists. The middle ground is missing. “It’s a problem across the former Soviet Union,” Professor Barkaya says. “The generation of scientists who came of age during perestroika went into business. Now there is again an interest in science, and it’s left to us to pass on our knowledge as best we can to the younger generation to ensure the good work continues.”

Ethical concerns that would undoubtedly surround such ventures in Europe are absent both in Abkhazia and in Russia. Neither institute has any security; the thought of animal rights protesters attacking does not even occur to the scientists.

“Of course, we’re aware of the ethical difficulties,” says Professor Lapin. “But in some cases monkeys are the only animals we can use. Thalidomide was tested on mice and other animals but not on monkeys, and you remember what happened there.”

Independent | Apr 17, 2008

By Rachel Shields

The Australian government has launched an investigation into claims that aboriginal children seized from their parents during the 1920s and 1930s were secretly used as guinea pigs for leprosy treatments.

The allegations surfaced at a Senate inquiry this week into plans to compensate the “stolen generation” of aboriginal Australians who were taken from their families as part of a government programme.

“As well as being taken away, they were used… There are a lot of things that Australia does not know about,” Kathleen Mills, a member of the Stolen Generations Alliance and an indigenous elder, told the hearing.

Ms Mills said children held at a compound in Darwin were injected with serums designed to be used in the treatment of leprosy – a practice which seriously damaged their health. Her uncle, who worked there as a medical orderly, had told her about the sinister goings-on.

“He said it made our people very, very ill. The treatment almost killed them,” she told reporters outside the hearing. “It was a common experience and a common practice.”

Australia’s Health Minister, Nicola Roxon, yesterday ordered an investigation into the accusations, asking that the State Health Department and the Department of Indigenous Affairs comb their archives for any evidence of such abuses. “These are obviously very serious allegations and we will do everything we can to ascertain the facts of the situation,” she said.

Between the late 19th century and the late 1960s, 100,000 aboriginal children were victims of a government policy that saw them taken from their homes and placed with white families, or in orphanages. The latest claims of abuse come just two months after the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, offered a historic apology to the children of the “stolen generation”, condemning the period as “a blemished chapter of ournation’s history”.

While the Prime Minister may have apologised for “the indignity and degradation” inflicted on the aboriginal community, his refusal to offer compensation has led many indigenous leaders to dismiss the move as a”cut-price sorry”.

Australia’s 450,000 aborigines are the country’s most disadvantaged social group, with a life expectancy 17 years lower than their white counterparts. They are three times more likely to be unemployed, and 13 times more likely to be imprisoned.

An infectious disease specialist from Sydney University has questioned the claims that aboriginal children were subject to unusual or inhumane practices.

Warwick Britton told ABC radio that in the 1920s and 1930s, leprosy sufferers were treated with chaulmoogra oil, which was painful when injected. “It is possible that this has been misunderstood as some kind of guinea pig therapy when in fact it was a treatment that was being used around the world,” he said.

Cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home

Asia Times | Apr 3, 2008

Today, many people fear US government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia.

By Nick Turse

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They’re creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the US military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at US military bases.

Today, many people fear US government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with “bio weapons”.

For the past 50 years, work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit - has led to some of the most lethal weaponry in the US arsenal: from Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable “fire and forget” guided missiles.

For the past several years, DARPA has funneled significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) program. This project is, according to DARPA, “aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis”. Put simply, the creation of cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.

Bugs, bots, borgs and bio-weapons

This past August, at DARPA’s annual symposium - DARPATech - HI-MEMS program manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell University, explained that his project aims to transform “insects into unmanned air-vehicles”. He described the research this way: “[T]he HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable.” In other words, micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so that they can be integrated into the insects’ bodies as they develop, creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect emerges from its cocoon.

According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker said, “We’re focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best time is for embedding.”

This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the “1st US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology” - a Pentagon-sponsored conference. “In the latest work,” he noted, “a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage.” But, as he pointed out, Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, laid out “on behalf of DARPA” some of the obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialized labs.

DARPA’s professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS program is the creation of “insect cyborgs” capable of carrying “one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination” - in other words, the creation of military micro-surveillance systems.

In a recent email interview, Michelson - who has previously worked on numerous military projects, including DARPA’s “effort to develop an “Entomopter” (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)” - described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a minimalist fashion, as a “[w]ide array of active and passive devices”. However in “Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems,” a 2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as “autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles” with on-board “[s]ensory systems such as video and chemical”.

Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the specter of the weaponization of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power - such as unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects - in the years ahead. “There’s no doubt their things will become weaponized,” he explained, “so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?” Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponization of such “devices” into account.

But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: “Bio weapons.”

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The Gazette | Mar 18, 2008

By Cindy Hadish

In about the time it takes to toast your bread, someone in America develops Alzheimer’s disease. By mid-century that time will be cut by more than half.

A report released Tuesday shows an estimated 10 million baby boomers — one out of eight — will develop the progressive brain disorder.

Up to 5.2 million Americans have the disease.

“It’s not an aging issue,” said Kelly Hauer, executive director of the Alzheimer’s Association East Central Iowa Chapter. “It’s a public health issue.”

In just two years, Iowa’s population of Alzheimer’s patients is predicted to grow from 65,000 to 69,000, according to the report, issued by the Alzheimer’s Association.

With 70 percent of Alzheimer’s patients living at home, the disease touches not only those afflicted, but their families and caregivers.

Last year, 95,733 Iowa caregivers provided more than 82 million hours of unpaid care for someone with Alzheimer’s or other dementia, valued at $874 million.

“It’s a tough job,” said Kathy Good, 61, of Cedar Rapids, whose husband, David Good, also 61, developed early onset Alzheimer’s at age 56.

A district court judge, David Good lost even simple abilities, such as finding the right word for “toothbrush.”

Kathy Good considers the couple lucky. Friends take her husband out to lunch or the YMCA. She has some flexibility in her job as a social worker. They have financial stability.

That’s not the same for everyone.

A bill in the Iowa Legislature would address the needs of Iowans living with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers.

Senate File 2341 calls for a county-by-county review to determine services and future needs of people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and address availability of caregiver services.

Another component of the bill addresses training for people who work in care facilities and those who care for an Alzheimer’s patient at home.

Tuesday’s report showed:

l Alzheimer’s is the seventh leading cause of death nationwide and the fifth-leading cause of death for those over age 65.

l Every 71 seconds, someone in America develops Alzheimer’s disease; by midcentury someone will develop Alzheimer’s every 33 seconds.

l By 2010, almost one-half million new cases of Alzheimer’s will occur annually; by 2050, there will be almost 1 million new cases each year.

l Women are nearly twice as likely as men to develop Alzheimer’s disease (17 percent vs. 9 percent) basically because women live longer.

l One in six women and one in 10 men age 55 and older can expect to develop Alzheimer’s disease in their lifetime.

Hauer said death rates from diseases such as stroke and breast cancer are declining as research money goes toward finding treatments and cures, but Alzheimer’s deaths continue an upward trend.

“We’ve got a disease that doesn’t have a cure,” she said. “With our graying state … now is the time to develop an effective blueprint to deal with this disease.”

Related

Alzheimer’s cases may quadruple by 2050

Sufferers Say Mysterious Colored Fibers Grow on Their Skin, Like Hair

Those living with Morgellons disease describe a mysterious fibrous material running through their skin. 

ABC | Jan 16, 2008

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today that it is launching a study to learn about an unexplained condition that causes people to feel as if they have foreign substances growing from their bodies.

People with the condition, referred to as Morgellons disease, say they have fibers and other inorganic material growing out of their skin.

“We earnestly want to learn more about this unexplained illness, which affects the lives of those who suffer from it,” said Dr. Michele Pearson, principal investigator leading the study for the CDC, in a press release. “Those who suffer have questions, and we want to help them.”

“We have a team of epidemiologists, laboratorians and pathologists to carry out the study,” Pearson said.

The study will be conducted in conjunction with Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California Division of Research. For more information, CLICK HERE to visit the CDC’s Unexplained Dermopathy Web site.

Watch the story tonight on “Nightline” at 11:35 p.m. ET and “Good Morning America” Thursday at 7 a.m.

In 2006, a number of Morgellons sufferers told ABC News in interviews that when they consulted doctors, they received diagnoses they called wrong or dismissive. Brandi Koch, the wife of former Major League Baseball player Billy Koch, said that she felt as if she were living in a horror movie, claiming she had colored fibers coming out of her skin.

Koch, of Clearwater Beach, Fla., said that her life was good until one day in the shower when she noticed something strange — tiny fibers running through her skin.

“The fibers look like hair, and they’re different colors,” Koch said.

Koch said she knows that what she experienced “sounds crazy,” but it’s true. “If I had a family member call me up and say, ‘I have this stuff,’ I’d say, ‘I’m sending a straitjacket over. You need some help,’” she said.

Anne Dill described a similar condition. Looking at Dill’s life in Florida, she seemed to be living the American dream — her three daughters excelled in sports and were straight-A students.

But life in the Dill household was far from idyllic. Anne’s 40-year-old husband, Tom, died in January 2006, and she believes his death was due to a contagious illness that has infected her entire family.

Dill described her family’s skin: “There’s this fibrous material. It’s in layers.” Dill said the skin on their hands was particularly bad, very swollen and itchy, and said it felt as if bugs were crawling underneath the skin.

Consulting Doctors

Dr. Greg Smith of Gainesville, Ga., has been a pediatrician for the past 30 years. He claimed that a fiber was coming out of his big toe, and he had video footage to prove it.

“It felt like somebody stuck a pin in my toe and wiggled it, and it just continued to hurt,” Smith told ABC News in 2006.

He said he never thought he had bugs. “I’ve certainly had those crawling sensations, and the fibers which come out of the skin are really bizarre, and really odd.”

Smith was handed over to a hospital psychiatrist when he went to the emergency room complaining of a fiber in his eye. He admits that he, too, would be skeptical if a patient came to him with the same story.

“I would wonder if they’d taken their medicine that day. It makes no sense. It’s totally bizarre. It’s something that — just telling the story is so outlandish on the face of it — that no one would believe it,” Smith said. Dill’s doctor told her to stop scratching, even though many of her sores were in places she could not reach.

Koch went to the Mayo Clinic, where doctors didn’t believe that the fibers she’d brought them had grown from her body.

“I saw the infectious disease doctor, and I showed him some samples that I had and he snickered,” she said. “I can’t go through another doctor blowing me off or looking at me like I’m crazy. I know I’m not.”

Dr. Vincent DeLeo, chief of dermatology at New York’s St. Lukes-Roosevelt Medical Center, weighed in on what he’d say to someone who came to him with this condition. “I don’t think this is any different than many patients I’ve seen who have excoriations and believe that there is something in their skin causing this,” he told ABC News in 2006.

DeLeo said the open lesions were most likely a result of scratching the skin.

Relying on Your Own Research

But biologist Mary Leitao refused to accept the medical skepticism surrounding Morgellons.

Leitao’s son, Drew, was just 2 years old when Leitao noticed an odd sore on his lip that would not heal.

“He very simply said ‘bugs,’ and he pointed to his lips,” said Leitao.

Leitao never expected to find herself at the center of a medical storm. But when her son complained about the strange sore, the biologist, who once ran the electron microscope at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, did what any scientist would do. She took a closer look.

“What I saw were bundles of fibers, balls of fibers,” Leitao says. “There was red and blue.” Even stranger, they glowed under ultraviolet light.

Armed with research, Leitao took her son to a doctor at one of the country’s leading hospitals. He dismissed her tale of fibers and wrote to her pediatrician, saying that her son needed Vaseline for his lips and that his mother needed a thorough psychiatric evaluation.

Undaunted, Leitao began poring through medical literature looking for clues. What she discovered was a 17th-century reference to a strange disease with “harsh hairs” called “Morgellons.”

She named the strange fibers Morgellons disease and put the information on a Web site, Morgellons.org. At the time of her interview in 2006, more than 4,500 people had contacted Leitao, claiming they had Morgellons-type symptoms. The name stuck, and the disease was featured on the television show “ER.”

But do these fibers grow from inside the body, as Morgellons patients believe, or do they come from the external environment — a kind of lint — as the medical skeptics say?

Searching for an Answer

Forensic scientist Ron Pogue at the Tulsa Police Crime Lab in Oklahoma checked a Morgellons sample against known fibers in the FBI’s national database. “No, no match at all. So this is some strange stuff,” Pogue said in 2006. He thought the skeptics were wrong. “This isn’t lint. This is not a commercial fiber. It’s not.”

The lab’s director, Mark Boese, said the fibers are “consistent with something that the body may be producing.” He added that, “These fibers cannot be manmade and do not come from a plant. This could be a byproduct of a biological organism.”

Dill said she looks at pictures of her family and finds them unrecognizable. “My kids have to see not only their dad but their mom disintegrating, and that’s gotta be really scary.”

While they wait for evidence that they hope will convince the medical community to take them seriously, some Morgellon’s sufferers wear pink bracelets that say, simply, “Fortitude.”

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By SEAN POULTER

A breed of Frankenfood is being introduced into human diet and cosmetics with potentially disastrous consequences, experts said last night.

Academics, consumer groups and Government officials are warning that the arrival of nanotechnology threatens dangerous changes to the body and the environment.

The particles it uses are so small - 80,000 times thinner than a human hair - that they can pass through membranes protecting the brain or babies in the womb.

Nano health supplements, such as antioxidants, are already on the market while the first of hundreds of new foods are expected to arrive in the next 12 months.

However, the products are being introdeduced without any regulation or independent assessment to ensure they are safe - mirroring the controversy over the launch of GM foods ten years ago.

Some critics have talked of the threat of the creation of a “grey goo” of tiny particles with hidden harmful properties.

Prince Charles has said it would be “surprising” if the technology did not “offer similar upsets” to thalidomide - the morning sickness drug that caused children to be born with deformed limbs.

Professor Vicki Stone, Professor of Toxicology at Napier University in Edinburgh, is concerned about unforeseen side effects.

“We know very little about the ability of nanoparticles to move around the body, to accumulate or to be excreted, or their potential to cause toxic effects in organs,” she said.

However, nanotech advocates have remarkable claims for the technology. For example, foods are in development that are said to stave off the aging process.

On a more trivial level, they suggest it would be possible to create a fizzy drink that changes flavour according to the number of times the can is shaken.

The consumer group Which? is about to launch a nanotech campaign arguing that consumers need to be consulted on the risks and benefits before it is too late.

The food and farming department Defra has published an independent report which admits there are serious gaps in safety data.

It warns: “There could be very significant implications for business and the wider community if potential risks are not identified and managed before any harm to the environment or human health may be done.”

The report - Characterising the Risks Posed by Engineered Nanoparticles - states there is a shortage of research money.

It says the resulting absence of basic information about the particles means “it will be difficult or impossible to develop any general understanding of nanoparticle toxicology”.

The report adds: “Transfer across biological barriers - e.g. to the brain or foetus - should be studied. Research into how long these tiny particles persist in the body is urgently needed.”

It warns that work assessing human toxicology is being hamstrung by “profound difficulties in accessing relevant funding for these longer term projects”.

Research by Which? found six out of ten people (61 per cent) have never heard of nanotechnology.

Sue Davies of Which? said: “The benefits that nanotechnologies can offer consumers are really exciting.

‘But before the market is flooded with products, it’s crucial the Government addresses the lack of scientific understanding about how some nanoparticles behave.”

The European Food Safety Authority last year held a conference on the future of food.

Dr Donald Bruce, an expert on food and ethics, told delegates that the arrival of nanotech foods has many similarities with GM products.

US corporations attempted to introduce GM before an effective safety regime could be established.

“One of the things to ask is do we need the benefits claimed by the producers?’ he said. ‘Also there is the underlying notion that we are tampering with nature.”

Environment minister Phil Woolas admitted there were gaps in knowledge, but denied the Government was failing to provide enough research cash.

Tiny particles that have generated great hopes and growing concerns

Nanotechnology involves using a substance in particles that are so small that the substance takes on new properties.

The name of the technology comes from the size of the particles - one nanometre in diameter - a millionth of a millimetre. Reduced to this size, materials can suddenly show very different and unexpected properties.

For example, an opaque substance such as copper becomes transparent, or an inert metal such as platinum becomes a catalyst and triggers chemical reactions.

Advocates argue that such particles can be organised to work together to deliver specific effects in a piece of equipment or in the human body.

They can be used to build miniature hard drives that have an immense memory, so allowing further miniaturisation and sophistication of products such as computers and mobile phones.

Washing machines have been developed that release silver nanoparticles that will kill bacteria in dirty washing.

Sun creams have been created so they become transparent rather than chalky white.

In medicine, it is claimed that nanotechnology will allow the creation of drugs that reach and treat a problem quickly.

Manufacturers are working on nanotech foods and supplements that are also designed to deliver specific health benefits.

Similarly, firms are working on developing anti-ageing foods, where nanotech particles associated with renewing the skin from the inside could be included in everyday products such as yoghurt, spreads or breakfast cereals.

The technology promises huge riches for firms which develop winning applications.

One of the first group of nanoparticles being utilised are fullerenes - tiny hollow carbon balls and tubes. They are very heat resistant, strong and conduct electricity.

The football-shaped C60 fullerene is being used in some anti-ageing products. The creams are said to reduce fine lines and firm the skin.

C60 has some antioxidant properties in that it kills the rogue chemicals which damage cells. However, a high dose can itself damage cells.

Some nano particles are known to mimic the harmful effects of asbestos on the lungs. Consequently, they have the potential to trigger lung cancer if inhaled.

“…advanced forms of biological warfare that can target specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.”

- Project For The New American Century

Struggle to survive: Nurse-midwife Lillo Kuape rushes barely breathing newborn Mankuebe Nyoba to the intensive-care nursery at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Maseru, Lesotho. No oxygen was available, and the baby died a few hours later.

Donations to fight AIDS, TB and malaria in Africa have inadvertently put many of those with other basic healthcare needs at risk.

By Charles Piller and Doug Smith

LA Times | Dec 16, 2007

MASERU, LESOTHO — Aneighbor shaved Matsepang Nyoba’s head with an antiquated razor. Blood beaded on her scalp. Tears trickled down her cheeks, but not because of the pain. She was in mourning, and this was a ritual.

Two days earlier, her newborn baby girl had died in the roach-infested maternity ward of Queen Elizabeth II, a crumbling sprawl that is the largest hospital in Lesotho, a mountainous nation of 2.1 million people surrounded by South Africa.

Nyoba, 30, whose given name means “mother, have hope,” has AIDS. But that is not what killed her baby daughter, Mankuebe.

Nyoba owes her own life to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given $8.5 billion to global health causes. Through its grantees, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the foundation underwrites, inspires or directs major efforts to prevent, cure or treat those diseases. The fund pays for Nyoba’s costly AIDS medicine.

But when she gave birth on a recent Sunday morning, her baby was suffering from a different kind of distress. The infant was limp and barely breathing. A nurse rushed her to the nursery, packed with sick babies, some two to a crib. Jury-rigged stethoscope tubes let six of the babies share lifesaving oxygen from a single valve.

There was no oxygen tube for Mankuebe. She asphyxiated for lack of a second valve. It would have cost $35.

Struggling to breathe: The nursery of the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Maseru, Lesotho, had only one working oxygen valve. Nurses used plastic hoods connected with rubber tubing to share the single flow of oxygen among as many as six sick infants.

The hospital, with no staff to move Mankuebe’s remains to the morgue, placed her body on a shelf near the delivery room while her father arranged for burial. The tiny corpse was swaddled in a baby blanket. A handwritten death notice was stuck to the blanket with a used hypodermic needle.

The Gates Foundation, endowed by the personal fortunes of the Microsoft Corp. chairman, his wife and Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren E. Buffett, has given $650 million to the Global Fund. But the oxygen valve fell outside the priorities of the fund’s grants to Lesotho.

Every day, nurses say, one or two babies at the hospital die as Mankuebe did — bypassed in a place where AIDS overshadows other concerns.

ENDGAME: Eugenics Depopulation Program - The Gates Foundation

Mixed effects

The Gates Foundation has targeted AIDS, TB and malaria because of their devastating health and economic effects in sub-Saharan Africa. But a Times investigation has found that programs the foundation has funded, including those of the Global Fund and the GAVI Alliance, which finances vaccines, have had mixed influences on key measures of societal health:

• By pouring most contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea and asphyxia.

• The focus on a few diseases has shortchanged basic needs such as nutrition and transportation, undermining the effectiveness of the foundation’s grants. Many AIDS patients have so little food that they vomit their free AIDS pills. For lack of bus fare, others cannot get to clinics that offer lifesaving treatment.

• Gates-funded vaccination programs have instructed caregivers to ignore — even discourage patients from discussing — ailments that the vaccinations cannot prevent. This is especially harmful in outposts where a visit to a clinic for a shot is the only contact some villagers have with healthcare providers for years.

The Gates Foundation’s largest grants for healthcare in Africa go to two organizations: the Global Fund and Geneva-based GAVI. The foundation formed GAVI and has given it $1.5 billion of more than $1.8 billion it has donated for vaccination programs. The Gates Foundation holds a seat on each group’s board of directors and helps determine their policies and priorities.

Because of the generosity of the foundation and other donors, millions of children have been protected against scourges such as malaria and measles — and AIDS deaths in much of Africa are finally leveling off. Dr. Mphu K. Ramatlapeng, Lesotho’s health minister, echoed health authorities worldwide when she said this would have been impossible “if it were not for the money from Bill Gates.”

Pills without food: Thanks to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Malerotholi Moleko, 41, gets free HIV medication. Her problem is hunger. “After I’ve taken the pills, my appetite becomes bigger, and I don’t have the food,” she said, hoisting her niece’s baby on her back in a colorful blanket.

But because of the overwhelming nature of AIDS, wartime disruptions and poor governance in some nations — and because of the priorities of global health groups, including GAVI and the Global Fund — key measures of societal health have stalled at appalling levels or worsened.

Dr. Peter Poore, a pediatrician who has worked in Africa for three decades, is a former Global Fund board member and consultant to GAVI (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization). He says they and other donors provide crucial help but overstate the impact of their programs. “They can also do dangerous things,” he said. “They can be very disruptive to health systems — the very things they claim they are trying to improve.”

In a recent editorial on the Global Fund, the British medical journal the Lancet Infectious Diseases wrote: “Many believe that its tight remit is increasingly becoming a strait jacket.”

Joe McCannon, vice president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a U.S.-based nongovernmental aid organization, or NGO, with operations in Africa, said, “You have to ask: ‘Net, are we having a positive effect?’ It’s a haunting question.”

Long walk home: Sheep graze in the rugged pasture as Malerotholi Moleko, 41, walks back to her village of Sefikeng, Lesotho, after the bus ride from the hospital for her AIDS treatment. Sometimes she barely makes it. Moleko is weak because most days her family eats only pappa, the staple cornmeal mush.

Full Story

. . .

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